BA(hons)Illustration at Plymouth

Good Luck Jess

Jess Douglas who graduated earlier this year will be showing here from Thursday, also her design made it onto the Ltd edition Tote bag, TOP : ) !!! NEWS. MORE INFO

Online text and Image magazine

Hello,
I've been following this wicked online illustration magazine called ideafixa. They've just released a new issue and it's all about typography, featuring a lot of really good (and some pretty bad) text and image work.
I Thought it would be good for the guys in second year who are currently looking at text and image (which is everyone, i think?)
Ideafixa Issue 13: Typography
You should check out some of the other issues as well, they have some great stuff up there!








This is some of the work on there by Mariana Coan

Some cool pages from 24hr comics event at Poly Arts Centre Falmouth

Some great pages here, see more at the blog site .

1st two pages from Jake Rowlinson, year 2 student on the course, and below one from Jack Teagle, who graduated this year.

 

and  a few of the other guys images, but this is just the merest sample, the project generated 240 pages of comic book art in 24 hours, how incredible. There is also a show planned of the work at The SOUP gallery, so know doubt a poster for that will be imminent.OR of course if you are in Falmouth, the show of work is still on till this Sat . Details are on the 24hr comic blog link.

Jack Teagle update

We had a an e-mail from Jack the other day with updates of what he has been up to since graduation last year.

" I got into Nobrow issue 2, and they asked me to produce a 24 page spot colour book off of that image, the royalties will add up to 2 grand, so excited! I'm doing that 24hr comic challenge in falmouth soon too. Had my work in a few smaller anthologies, I need to get drawing more comics! Hopefully they also want another screenprinted book, they seem to really like my stuff. I've had 2 editorial comissions from research world magazine so far, a full page illustration, and recently a full page and a spot, all through one little mock up editorial on my flickr! " JACK TEAGLE

This is great to hear, there is also a possibility of a solo show in Portugal next year AND now the 24hr comic challenge is over i can alos add that Jack completed the challenge 4 hours early and did a mini comic as well! See more amazing 24hr comic book work on the project blog, the link is in an earlier post.

 

also ! "Found out today that my entry for Anorak's 'Draw Us a Happy Cover' competition has won. I'm over the moon! The image will feature on the outside, back cover of the winter issue of Anorak. I can't wait!"

Top News !

24 hour comic event .

http://thefalmouth24hrcomic.blogspot.com/

This is amazing ! See it as it happens right now !!!

The Hand Made House

The Hand made house Artists market at Drake Circus was a great success, as you can see it looked amazing, its certainly something Plymouth needs and i'm sure it would be possible to get even more customers if the event happens again as planned next year. Great PR for the event was generated through an interview with Kate Mowbray and Stef Walker on Radio Devon on the morning of the event.

'The Handmade House was a great learning experience. Thanks to Dave Hotchkiss who did a lot of the organising for it. It was good working with him to organise all the logistics of it etc. A lot of work was sold and it advertised the Illustration course really well as a lot of members of the public were interested in talking to us about the course. It was a good business opportunity to see what sells, how to present work to a high standard for selling, how to price items based on costings and how much profit you want to make, and how to interact with the public about your art work. Thanks to everyone who manned the stall throughout the day and helped with the set up and tidying away. Note to second years- I think it would have been better to have it over a few days, as a lot of effort was involved to set it up and clear down afterwards. I think it will be great to do this again in the new year, but have work from all 3 years. ' Stef Walker

 

 

 

Interesting Show at V&A ''Gardens neatly razed': The Art of the Flopsy Bunnies'

Sketch of flower borders (unused background study for The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Beatrix Potter

10 August - 17 December 2009

Leighton, Room 102
Free admission

'Gardens neatly razed': The Art of the Flopsy Bunnies

This display, celebrating the centenary of 'The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies' (1909), highlights Beatrix Potter's use of real landscapes to establish a distinctive sense of place in her fiction.  Potter's book illustrations to the tale, on loan from the British Museum, feature alongside her background sketches of the garden of her uncle's house at Gwaynynog, Denbighshire - the inspiration for the setting of her story.

EXHIBITION IN STOLEN SPACE GALLERY

EXHIBITION IN STOLEN SPACE GALLERY!!

'Hi guys! A little update, Im going to have my work exhibited in the Stolen Space Gallery Christmas Group show. Its on for a month, and the opening night is the 3rd of Dec. See you there!! Other artists confirmed are, D*Face, Kai and Sunny, Shepard Fairey and Pete Fowler!' JESS DOUGLAS

Brilliant ! This will be a TOP show.

AND ! heres the final art for the Renault Ad that Jess did just after graduating. Thers a link to Jess's site in the alumni section if you want to see more great work like this.

Strong Entries for the V&A Student Illustrator Award 2010

Great entries already from our students, i pulled these images from the V&A website. The competition website is getting loads of traffic, its a great place to get your work seen, so well worth a go. Closing date is the 15th Dec, but of course the sooner you get your work up the more people will see it. OK so here's the work thats up there already from our course. Sorry if i missed anyone ! here the V&A competition site link.

'Location piece based on the Barbican in Plymouth. I used screen printing to produce an envelope design.' STEF WALKER

'I am Gasometer'
Kate Mowbray
http://www.katemoby.com
8 November 2009

'A location based brief resulted in my focussing on an old gasmeter structure on the edge of town. I chose to use it as a symbol for the necessary, but overlooked. The first image (Kate Mowbray 1) was a warm up piece.

'The other two are the end result of a web based series, where the viewer has to interact with the structure and build it from a blank screen, one click at a time, by discovering the newly revealed piece. After a new element has been "built" in the scene, the page of text appears, reinforcing the metaphor.

This forces the viewer to study something that normally would be overlooked. "Kate Mowbray 2" shows the final structure image fully built up, and "Kate Mowbray 3" shows the final page of text, with all the metaphors that are revealed, and the chance to start the process again.' KATE MOWBRAY

'Snapshotsmiles'
Alex Walker
Student
http://www.snapshotsmiles.com

11 November 2009

'Collaboration of photography and type. Using candid photos and giving them character and narratives.' ALEX WALKER

Online portfolio services, website builders & domain masking/forwarding

There are several online portfolio services which require little to no technical knowledge to quickly set up and get going. Most I've listed here are free but have a 'premium' paid option. They're loosely listed in suitability order.

•   http://www.carbonmade.com/

•  http://portfolio.deviantart.com/
Probably all of you know deviantArt and, rightly so, wouldn't want to link a potential client to a deviantArt account! However, their new portfolio service looks promising, lightweight and ad-free.

•  http://www.behance.net/
Just add '/frame' after your profile URL to get just your portfolio, without all the other behance website navigation etc.

•  http://www.coroflot.com/

•  http://www.weefolio.com/

•  http://www.krop.com/creativedatabase/

•  http://www.shownd.com/

•  http://www.bigblackbag.com/

•  http://www.viewbook.com/

•  http://www.flickr.com/
Mainly a photography community, but some people use it as an illustration portfolio.

For several reasons, perhaps you don't want a URL such as 'http://yourname.carbonmade.com' as your website address. Maybe you'll decide to change to a different web portfolio service in the future or possibly the service you choose to use will start charging too much or close down altogether - resulting in peoples bookmarks and links to your website no longer being correct. Aside from that, a www.yourname.co.uk domain looks more professional printed on your business cards or other promotional material.

You can buy .co.uk domains for around £3.00 per year and 'mask' it to your portfolio URL. It's easy to set up so when a visitor visits www.yourname.co.uk it instantly forwards them through to your portfolio URL. You can either have it so the URL in the address bar changes (to the actual portfolio URL) when the visitor is (re)directed or you can choose to keep www.yourname.co.uk in the address bar of the browser. The latter is referred to as 'domain masking'.

If you prefer a .com (maybe you plan on working in different countries, or just like that international esteem to a .com) the same thing can be set up. Two registrars I recommend are 123-reg (http://www.123-reg.co.uk/)or 1&1 (http://www.oneandone.co.uk/). Their prices are competitive, ranging from £2.49 - £2.99 per year for a .co.uk depending on various offers etc. and a .com is typically around £10.00 per year.

I use 123-reg, so here is instructions on setting up domain masking: Once logging in to the control panel, select your domain from the drop-down and click 'manage'. From here click on 'web-forwarding' then check the radio button next to 'non-framed web-forwarding' (this is effectively domain masking). Then just paste or type the full URL of your domain, including the 'http://' prefix, in the text field below. From this page you also have some basic control over meta tag information for your domain, so you can enter keyword(s) for search engines to pick up on.

The principle will be similar in other control panels and shouldn't be difficult to figure out.

•  http://www.123-reg.co.uk/

•  http://www.oneandone.co.uk/

 

Additionally, it gives an air of professionalism to have a matching email with your domain, both for the 'contact' section of your portfolio site and printed (self)promotional material. E.G. 'info@yourname.co.uk' or 'forename@yourname.co.uk' rather than 'dancing_fairy2588@hotmail.com' or whatever other strange personal email you thought of when you were 14.

You don't have to fuss about with POP3 mailboxes & a software mailclient. You can do a similar thing to domain masking with your emails and even have it catch 'anything_and_everything@yourname.co.uk' and skip it straight on to your webmail or student email, or whatever you like.

Again, instructions for 123-reg are as follows: Once logging in to the control panel, select your domain from the drop-down and click 'manage'. From here click on 'e-mail management' then click on 'create your email addresses'. In the first field input an asterisk wildcard (*) to setup a CATCHALL. Select 'forward to another address' from the drop-down then paste or type your personal email address in the final field (double check it's correct, else you may end up never seeing the emails). Lastly click 'save'.

For all of the above you do not need a web hosting package. There are disadvantages to domain masking: as www.yourname.co.uk stays in the address bar, it's difficult for your visitors to bookmark or copy&paste an individual page or a permalink to an image of yours. So you may decide on domain forwarding instead. Some of the portfolio services or website builders (see below) allow you to use your own domains instead of their regular subdomain ('yourname.thierdomain.com'). Though often, but not always, this is only feature of the premium packages.

 

Another option, if you want a little more control over your website design, but you don't want to be wading knee-high in markup is to use 'drag & drop' website builders.

•  http://www.mrsite.com/

•  http://www.weebly.com/

•  http://www.moonfruit.com/

 

Alternatively, there are frameworks you can design upon. However, you'll need a hosting package.

•  http://www.wordpress.org/
is well-known, with thousands of themes available. Arguably overkill for a simple portfolio website and if you want to start customising themes or building one from scratch for Wordpress, it gets a bit more complicated. But Wordpress is powerful and can make a great CMS (content management system).

•  http://www.indexhibit.org/
is another option - lightweight, straightforward with plenty of simple instructions on how to set it up.

 

Lastly, I highly recommend Google Analytics (it's free). It will enable you to find out all kinds of information about your traffic. Things like: what search terms people use to find your website, where your visitors come from (referring sites as well as geographical location), the browser they use, their connection speed, how long they spend on your website, etc. and of course, a hitcounter. A lot of these portfolio services and website builders mentioned above will have an html edit where you can paste in the Analytics code snippet or sometimes they'll have a specific function to incorporate Google Analitics.

•  http://www.google.com/analytics/